On August 6, 1945, a lone B-29 of the American Army Air Force dropped a uranium fueled atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Thousands of people died both in the immediate bombing and in the months to follow. President Truman hoped to use the destruction of Hiroshima to convince the Japanese government that continued resistance would only lead to untold suffering by the Japanese people, as well as the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen in the inevitable invasion of the Japanese main islands.
The first attempt failed in that regard, so a second bombing happened at Nagasaki on August 8. Another city was annhilated and its population was decimated, which led to the surrender of Japanese forces on August 15.
Ever since, we have been debating the decision to kill so many people using such a terrible weapon. The cold calculus of millions of dead and wounded in an invasion versus the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands may make sense, but it only brings home to me that in a total war, there are few truly moral options open to leaders. Every decision leads to someone suffering; the trick is to choose the one with the least amount of death and pain.
Those who want to cast the bombing of Japan as an evil act by immoral men need to study their own history. Truman was given no good options, a situation every leader faces at one time or another. Few decisions are as momentous as whether or not to utilize the most destructive weapons in history, but they are all important. A leader who refuses to take the best of a set of bad options is not a leader, he is a pretender.
DaddyBear’s Den 
Drang
/ August 7, 2012It is common knowledge that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb when the war ended. It is not commonly known that the Japanese had, not one, but two separate atomic bomb projects going, one navy, one army.
I recommend that anyone who feels like Monday morning quarterbacking the decision to nuke Japan read Paul Fussel’s essay (or book) “Thank God For The Atom Bomb.”
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LabRat
/ August 8, 2012The hippies have sprouted along the sidewalks of Los Alamos for their annual protest. They are wearing, I kid you not, sackcloth and ashes.
They make me pretty angry. Yes, I’m sorry radiation is horrible. I’m sorrier that fire wasn’t horrible enough and we roasted, blasted, and starved many, many more than those that died in those two attacks trying to accomplish the same thing.
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Mad Jack
/ August 9, 2012I am not sorry the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I’m not a bit sorry the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. After I read about the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731, my only regret is that the United States failed to drop a third atomic bomb on Japan as a lesson to the Japanese of just exactly what would happen should the (devastated) empire of Japan ever try to pull anything remotely resembling WWII again, and as an example to the rest of the world of what would happen to them if they ever tried it.
The things that the Japs did in Nanjing were terrible, horrible crimes against China. The acts the Japanese perpetrated at Unit 731 were absolutely diabolical.
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